Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

220. OH ZIPPORAH:

I met a girl named Toni Schlesinger and together we went to Williamsburg one day in Brooklyn getting over there by train and then walking to this place two girls were living in two girls she had to talk with she said for something she was writing so we got there and the interesting thing was it was a railroad apartment in a former funeral home a place that had been transformed and reworked since that time but somehow even I could tell that something was weird because even though a lot of work had been done you could still tell that these had been maybe rooms where dead people had been laid-out in caskets and viewings took place and all that but a lot of that I’m sure was imaginings and power of suggestion and all whatever and the two girls living in there with whom we wound up talking and having tea and sitting around awhile with were named Zipporah Lax and Sara McGrath and they were both art teachers just starting out in the NY school systems Zipporah at P.S. 161 in Harlem and Sara at ‘Beginning With Children’ a school right there in Williamsburg a pre-school I guess but never thought to ask and I for sure first thing thought ‘Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you’ that thought kept running through my head and Toni asked them about it being a former funeral home and what it meant to them and all about whatever spirits and stuff they’d felt if any and how they liked it there and it turned out the apartment used to be the viewing room and any embalming was done in the basement and like many of the funeral homes in the early 20th century it was designed with torchere lamps and we got to speaking about how maybe right in these rooms the bereaved would come to see their dearly departed but how maybe one of the bereaved was a murderer or like in some crummy TV show Toni said it would be a widow a rich bratty widow sobbing anyway in spite of all that no candles or nothing creepy instead the two girls were happy and cheerful and homey with even a stupid pan of brownies on the stove and on the wall by the refrigerator something was hanging and Toni asked what it was and Sara said 'it’s a traditional Mayan men’s shawl that I got in this town in Chiapas where every man was wearing one I’ve traveled a lot you see' and then Zipporah said 'Sarah and I met in college when we were both at Pratt for art and I thought she was really cool and a fellow traveler' and then Sarah said 'we used to have a map above the kitchen table but we had to take it down because we just kept talking about where we wanted to go all the time' and then Zipporah said 'the map sucked us in too much' and Sarah said 'I want to go back to Mexico for a year to become bilingual' and as I was trying to keep notes and I saw it was getting more difficult to distinguish who was saying what I started just using names in brackets to show who was speaking and this is how what follows got started and then I asked about whether to them it was important to know a place deeply for if not wasn’t one just skimming surfaces and winding up merely having long discussions as a girl with bellhops and busboys and they agreed in their way but said as females they were always attuned to that kind of stuff anyway and people like service boys and guys were always hitting on them or as girls trying to begin discussions anyway so none of that mattered for as you travel they said you’re going to be able to keep away from the avoidance of others at least 80 per cent of the time if you’re sharp and probably 20 percent you’ll end up the next morning strangely in some guy’s bed or with some guy and only a pale remembrance of what you were doing but as lesbians they could figure to avoid all that whether they had to tell guys or whether guys simply surmised what was up but even then sometimes they went with it for the experience anyway so nothing mattered it was just travel and then [Sarah] 'I’m from California San Luis Obispo and my parents met coming back from India where my dad had gone on a spiritual journey but the guru had turned him away and he and my mom were on a ferry from Belgium to England and my dad didn’t have the money for the fare so he was trying to sell some beads and he thought my mother was a snotty American and then I was born in Scotland when my mom at that time was 19 and when I was 19 I was taking that same ferry and I looked around while on it and said ‘where’s my future husband?’ but it never happened' and Toni pointed out to Sarah all the beads she had on and asked then wasn’t she preparing for a man thereby or why the decoration and Sarah said 'no not at all in fact Zipporah calls these my art-teacher jewels' and then [Zipporah] 'my parents met traveling too on a kibbutz in Israel but then they came back to Miami where I grew up and Sarah’s and my stories are very similar and Sarah is like my fifth roommate in this apartment and I moved here about 4 years ago when I found out my grandparents used to live in Williamsburg in fact my grandmother was Mr. Farber’s secretary at the Farberware factory' [Sarah] 'my dad grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor which is England’s largest hospital for the criminally insane' [Zipporah] 'your dad’s so sunny and airy' [Sarah] 'he’s been in California a while' and then Toni commented on how there was a lot of knotty pine in the apartment a sort of ‘potbelly aesthetic’ she called it [Zipporah] 'so Alpine ski lodge that’s my landlord he did a lot of home improvement after it was a funeral home and when I moved in I found little antlers on the fireplace and my landlord said ‘you can tell we like the country’ which actually made me laugh when I thought about it because it’s funny how people who like the country seem to always wind up having a particular fascination with killing things shooting the native habitat whether by guns plowing cutting or whatever so these little antlers proved he loved the country so much he had to kill defenseless animals to prove it and then cut off their body parts and leave them around to show what he’d done - so weird' [Sarah] 'Zipporah did a lot of work in here' [Zipporah] 'Sarah likes to decorate and that’s why she’s so much fun to live with' [Sarah] 'I lived in 15 homes before I was 18 so you’d think I’d have a few possessions with all the traveling' [Zipporah] 'Sarah’s a collector she came here with three suitcases and one was all full of pictures nothing more' [Sarah] 'I moved in last fall for good before that I’d been gone from New York for a while traveling and Zipporah offered me the room in August and even though I wanted to look around first I said yes and I know it sounds weird but I did want to look around because my last two situations in New York were both offered to me by good friends in fact one said ‘I’ll look around for the apartment on the Lower East Side – you bring the Earl Grey’ so it’s always been like that a lot with me and this time I first had an inclination to say no but I said yes anyway because I so much like Zepporah and wanted her to know that' and Toni said 'everyone wants you to live with them it seems ! I wonder who will be next' [Sarah] 'I do have someone waiting for me in Mexico' and the two girls begin to break up in uncontrolled laughter 'forever - he said' [Zipporah] 'he sent her a birthday card that sings' and from that point all they did was laugh…